Microsoft interview Monochrome
by Matt Glavin 7:16 pm Thursday, 20 November 2008.

Hi, I’m Matt Glavin, Business Manager for Monochrome – I joined Monochrome in September of this year to be part of the Rich Internet Application space.  Part of my role for one of the UK’s leading RIA Agencies is to explore new avenues working with Alliance partners to maximise new business opportunities.  Monochrome joined the Microsoft Partnership over 12 months ago with aim of working with some of the newest and most innovative technologies available today…

We’ve all heard about Silverlight & WPF technology and the pros and cons related, this new dynamic drive from Microsoft to utilise the UX delivery for their major product stack is proving to be an exciting ride for Monochrome.  Since joining the MS eco-system we’ve worked on a number of enterprise level opportunities to deliver applications in WPF & Silverlight – How?  Well we’ve identified the benefits of working with other MS partners who’s services compliment our own, it’s called the Design, Develop, Deliver methodology.  The basic principal behind this approach is to expand our ‘new business’ horizon by offering ‘more value’ to prospective customers.  Of course, one of the great benefits of building partner relations is you can share opportunities increasing your pipeline by 30-40% overnight….fantastic!

Anyway, Microsoft visited Monochrome last week to spend the day filming our business in full operation to demonstrate to other partners out there how exciting the fast developing market that is Rich Internet.  Myself & Niklas Richardson (Monochrome’s Technical Director) were asked to do an interview piece to discuss specifically UX (User Experience) and the benefits of using the Design, Develop, Deliver approach….all very interesting.  The video is yet to be released but there’s photo’s on our blog.

Monochrome are always open to discussing partner opportunities with other organisations, if you want to chat drop me an email or give me a call – my details can be found here.

I’m a PC!

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Why player penetration isn’t as important as you might think
by Neil Middleton 12:05 pm Wednesday, 12 November 2008.

Something we come across a lot when we’re talking about Rich Internet Applications is the questions regarding player penetration, i.e how many people have player X installed (Adobe’s Flash vs. Microsoft’s Silverlight), as it’s generally seen as the primary measure for how easy to “see” an application will be.

However, something we’re also seeing is that the players are currently suited to different areas, Flash being very good for the public sites (video being No 1) and Silverlight being very good for Intranet based applications where Microsoft technology is used as the back end.

So, with player penetration it’s worth considering the following:  Is the player penetration at all important when you are looking at an intranet application with a closed user audience?  Do you need to worry about the percentage of the internet that has your runtime installed if you can go round and install it on all your users machines for them anyway?

Not really.

This raises another interesting thing, which is that of internal approval.  We are now finding that for those environments where neither Flash (in a new enough version) or Silverlight are present, companies are generally more willing to take on Silverlight due to the vendor - it’s a product that comes from a company they already have a relationship with, and also one that can be pushed out via Windows Update and the like.  It’s a sys-admins dream come true.

So, at the end of the day it seems that Flash vs Silverlight is definitely a case of best tool for the job.  If you are building a public facing site of some kind, use the Flash platform.  However, if you’re in a closed environment and MS are already in place - go with Silverlight / WPF.  These choices will just make your life easier.

PS:  Incidentally, we still come across lots of businesses who haven’t broken free of IE6, a seven year old browser yet (!) due to some internal policy - this goes to show how hard it can sometimes be bringing in a third party plugin to help with RIA’s.

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First CF Doc’s podcast now live!
by Niklas Richardson 5:53 pm Monday, 10 November 2008.

The first episode of the UKCFUG’s CF Doc podcast is now live!

Monochrome’s Niklas Richardson and Neil Middleton, along with CFEclipse fame Mark Drew kicked off the first episode of the CF Doc podcast in front of a live audience at last week’s November UKCFUG meeting.

You can read more about the first episode on the UKCFUG website.

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PrintQueue - PDF printing with Acrobat Reader end to end solution
by Radek Gruchalski 4:59 pm .

Last week I posted twice on printing PDF documents. This is the last post of this unplanned series. Today I would like to present an end to end solution including ColdFusion PrintQueue event gateway with two C# applications for controlling Acrobat Reader. Quick summary of the problem we faced last week: ColdFusion cfprint tag has problems when printing documents created with LiveCycle Designer. Not all items from documents, specially repeated regions are printed. At Monochrome we had to figure out how to print them. Simplest solutions are best and we decided to go with Acrobat Reader batch printing capabilities.
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Updating your hosts file in Vista 64-bit
by Neil Middleton 11:37 am Monday, 3 November 2008.

I came across an interesting issue this morning whereby my hosts file had simply vanished.  For the unitiated amongst you, this file presents a kind of local DNS for Windows TCP/IP which essentially means you can make up a domain and point it at an IP address and have that apply to your machine only.

Now, normally this file is located in %systemroot%\system32\drivers\etc where %systemroot% is C:\Windows.  However, on 64-bit, System32 is replaced by SysWOW64.  Not such a big issue, except when you go looking for your hosts file from inside a 32-bit application such as Flex Builder / Eclipse.

For some reason, in Vista 64-bit, 32-bit applications can’t see the 64-bit tree, meaning that the hosts file is essentially invisible.  So, how the hell do we get round this?

Well, backdoor ahoy - there is a solution.  In your C:\Windows folder (%systemroot%) create a “sysnative” folder and browse through that.  Bingo! your good old 32-bit folder structure should now be present, and low and behold your hosts file.

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